May in Ayemenem is a hot, brooding month. The days are long and humid. The river shrinks and black crows gorge on bright mangoes in still, dustgreen trees. Red bananas ripen. Jackfruits burst. Dissolute bluebottles hum vacuously in the fruity air. They they stun themselves against clear windowpanes and die, fatly baffled in the sun.

The nights are clear but suffused with sloth and sullen expectations.

But by early June the south-west monsoon breaks and there are three months of wind and water with short spells of sharp, glittering sunshine that thrilled children snatch to play with. The countryside turns an immodest green.

In many ways, I feel drawn to contrast this with and against my close reading of Dorian Gray a fortnight ago, with its sensual riot.

But this is a harsher, more unforgiving place. A place where nature still holds sway, and man has to negotiate his presence. Life feels different here.

Is it weird to say ‘more alive’?

Close Reading

There’s a memorable passage in the early parts of the HG Wells classic ‘The War of the Worlds’, when we see a Martian for the first time. I’ve used it in class many times, because the journalist narrator employs a raft of similes and metaphors to try to describe the alien emerging from his spaceship.

I mention this because when we encounter anything new, I think we’re programmed as human beings to try to understand it by reference to what we already know. Hence the Martian becomes snake-like, bear-like, Gorgon-like.

Today’s close reading is also the coldest of readings.

By that I mean that – to my slight embarrassment – I know absolutely nothing about this author, or the novel. This isn’t always so, as regular readers will know – most of the time, I am pretending to be reading for the first time. It’s the primary rule of the series – feign ignorance, and focus on the 100 words, not the other things I know.

This time it’s real ignorance, with the vulnerability which comes with forming and expressing opinions with no idea whether they will be borne out, but the excitement which comes with the purity of the exercise.

What it also means is that – like Wells’ journalist – I’m going to find myself leaning quite heavily on my reading history to make sense of this one. If you notice a few more comparisons than normal, you know why.

Where some other writers have worked hard to develop relationships with narrators in their first 100 words (see ‘Rebecca‘), Arundhati Roy focuses on another of the reader’s first questions: not ‘who is this about?’ but ‘where are we?’

Welcome to Ayemenem.

It doesn’t simply sound exotic from a prosaic North Wales study. It’s a name which doesn’t readily roll off the tongue (compare with the glorious ‘Rumpelmayer’ at the beginning of Mrs Dalloway). You need to slow this one down, practice it, maybe say it out loud a couple of times to untangle the pattern of shapes your mouth needs to make. That lends it significance and makes it more memorable. The message I’m getting is that whoever we meet, they’ll be operating within, and affected by, the location.

So, ‘where’ has primacy. Even over ‘when’, as we track through what it’s like to inhabit Ayemenem over a period which mentions month names, sure, but is really being measured in weather patterns and seasons. Taking the 100 words as a whole, this is one of the factors contributing to what I said at the top about nature holding full sway.

Life rarely seems comfortable for the humans who live in Ayemenem. Roy tells us it’s ‘hot’, it’s ‘humid’, it’s ‘sullen’ and ‘brooding’, and even when respite from the monsoon comes, it seems dangerous, potentially painful to take too much advantage of the vague threat of the ‘sharp, glittering’ sunshine.

When night comes, the respite of sleep seems hard to find. When I read that marvellously sibilant phrase:

‘suffused with sloth and sullen expectations’

I can almost feel myself there, so enervated and resentful that I can’t even fully appreciate the beauty of the ‘clear nights’.

I don’t believe for a second that Roy is telling us that Ayemenem is a ‘bad’ place, by the way.

My sense is that people –might– live there under sufferance, that she’s describing a location at worst indifferent to the people who inhabit it. In this reading, what might that greater force be?

‘Sufferance?’ Of who, or what? This is where I reach for Oscar Wilde.

The contrast is nature controlled and curated against nature untrammelled.

Those dystopian cousins I’ve already examined (Nineteen Eighty-Four and The Handmaid’s Tale) lean into setting, but they are sterile locations. In Dorian Gray, we’re observers of a full and glorious nature, albeit through an open door. Roy doesn’t quite make us participants, but at least we can feel the soil underneath our barefoot toes. Wilde’s garden seems so carefully curated – for colour scheme, for the heady, almost overwhelming cocktail of scents I talked about. For human consumption.

Who ‘curates’ Ayemenem?

In a sense every writer is a curator of the things they decide to talk about. Roy gives us this riot of vivid, uncoordinated colours: the black, dust green, red (red bananas?! I am desperate to know how they taste!). Even the blue of the flies I’ll return to later. This sense of almost careless abundance continues.

Nature seems almost profligate. Until you check your viewpoint and realise how that idea infers that it is here to serve humans. Any scent in the air is ‘fruity’. And I love the energy that comes when jackfruits ‘burst’. And when crows ‘gorge’.

The river shrinks. When the monsoon comes, the river will grow, maybe even flood. There’s a huge amount of life in this opening, but there’s also death. Again, read enough, and the deliberate choice of ‘black crows’ when so many other exotic and cheerful alternatives might have been available? It adds a sombre tone. Not quite funereal, but dark.

Then, those flies.

First reaction is to take them at face value. Repellant and multitudinous. I can’t see anyone mourning their deaths.

Second reaction is to interrogate whether they might be interpreted differently. Not more positively. Just differently. What makes me think Roy might have something else to say here? She uses such interesting terms to describe them and their activities – so teasingly close to personification. They’re ‘dissolute’, and vacuous, and how can we not linger on the idea that they might die ‘fatly baffled’?

Perhaps what interests me most is how they die – what baffles them is a set of glass. The only manmade object in the first 100 words. Transparent, and illusory. An invisible barrier which, for the poor flies, prevents escape. It feels weighty, symbolic of the invisible things human beings construct as barriers against each other, and between them and the world.

Remember, I’m cold reading. I could be absolutely wrong. But right here, right now, I feel like Arundhati Roy is whispering in my ear: ‘hey, you, pay attention to this bit.’

Again, I want to say that I’m not feeling frightened by these first 100 words.

A little insignificant, perhaps.

A little awestruck.

A little more aware of my own mortality.

If, when, I get round to reading the novel, the people who find themselves in the world Roy has created are going to have plenty to contend with – but despite the inhospitable-sounding setting, I suspect that most of their difficulties will be man-made.

As you read on, look out for …

1 – how far the location, perhaps nature, becomes a protagonist in its own right

2 – each character’s relationship with the environment. Is it revealing about their character?

3 – given what we might call the timeless quality of the opening, does the plot feel like a special, one-off set of circumstances? Or instead does it deal with themes and issues which are more universal, irrespective of time and place?

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